Ukraine Conflict Vehicle Tracking Project: First Week

On February 3rd, Bellingcat launched the Ukraine conflict vehicle tracking project, a collaborative effort where we collect reports on movement of military equipment in and near Ukraine to determine if Russian units have crossed the border.

We opened a channel through Checkdesk through which anyone watching the conflict can submit reports of interesting vehicle sightings. These reports are validated by the Bellingcat team, after which they’re added to our data set that is made available through Silk, a platform for creating rich visualizations of data.

The project has gotten plenty of attention during its first week, with mentions ranging from Kyiv Post to Norway’s Aftonbladet.

During the first week, we made a number of improvements to Bellingcat’s vehicle tracking project Silk site, including some tweaks to the home page, as well as generally improving the presentation of many pages. Most notably, the sightings pages got some additional information, and now contain geolocation information, as well as quick links to other sightings from the same location. (See an example here.)

At launch, our data set had 94 entries, and during the first week we’ve taken in 71 new entries, bringing us to a total of 165 entries. The entries range in time from early 2014 to the past few days. We also still have many entries in unprocessed in our backlog as we’re reacting to current events, so the data set will keep growing as quickly as we can process it.

A few things stand out here: there are Kamaz Vystrel and Pantsir-S1 sightings, equipment which is not used by the Ukrainian military. (Note: we’re using Vystrel as the generic bucket for all vehicles of that family, including the Dozor-N variant used by Russian armed forces.) If we have a closer look at the Vystrel sightings, something interesting stands out. The vehicles have also been seen in footage of the Debaltseve offensive.

Thus, it seems clear military equipment has been transferred from Russia to Ukraine, and is also being used in the Debaltseve offensive. This is in line with other findings we’ve mentioned earlier, such as the Pantsir-S1 sightings in Ukraine, a modern Russian air defence system not found in the Ukrainian military’s inventory.

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Veli-Pekka is a doctoral student at Finnish National Defence University, researching social media and open source intelligence. He has a long background in the technology industry, more recently focusing on defense research.

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15 Comments

Cease-fire it is good. But we see, that Putin violates more times the promises. In Moscow already now say that won’t execute the agreement. The lethal defensive weapons for Ukraine can force it to keep the promise this time. Not to provide weapons for Ukraine simply increases Russia’s temptation to violate an agreement. The purpose of the president Putin – destroy Ukraine and execute the “sacred mission” – fight against the West.Putin to stop only when restores the USSR. Or even all socialist camp. Until it was stopped, Putin will threaten Baltic states and East Europe. KGB officer understand blow in a muzzle, but not talk.

Not only the dots refer to russian troops. As far as I understand it, geometric markings on the vehicles where used to reference company tactical groups or battalion tactical groups. E.g. forces of the 5th guards (armored) brigade where using unfilled rectangles. If those troops are russian only (“volunteers”) I can’t tell, but in my view it is likely.

The democratic development of Russia ended 1993 and the country chose the authoritarian way, way back to czarist or party ruling, with ideas from the past. Mr. Putin thinks he is the savior releasing the people from a long oppression? Why first now, that is an interesting question. However, Russia has been very aggressive since 1917, which the neighboring countries know too well. Putin thinks he can made a new superpower with arms – partly to cover his country´s real problems. Bad thing for him is that Europe has almost 500 Mio inhabitants, Russia 120. Even worse is that the World has 7,2 billion inhabintants……

If I could suggest you, put more attention to the determination of the specific types of tanks used in the Donbas. Particularly important here is the presence of T72B3 tanks, documented on several photos and films. T72B3 were never used by the army of Ukraine. They can be relatively easily identified by the presence of the thermal viewfinder Sosna-U. They are the proof of support from Russia. It should be noted that these tanks require better trained crew than older types and it is very likely that they were send to Ukraine with crew.

I agree. Such Russian tanks as T-72B3 and T-72BA are important to be distinguished separately, because they were never exported to Ukraine. However 5 of these were destroyed in Ukraine. And even NATO specialists couldn’t identify them exactly.
For example, both of these tanks use the same “Kontakt-5” armour. T-72B3 doesn’t have an infra red lamp to the left of its cannon (as most T-72B do). T-72BA has a wind-detector rod on its turret and a new type of tracks (appearing to have lots of letters “T” on them).
Maybe some kind of visual guide to Russian armour should be found (or compiled) in order to help identify such things…

Thanks a lot, Veli-Pekka, it proved to be a very useful resource already!
However, I would suggest to add yet more information to the sightings pages to improve their verifiability. For example, I think the “[1136] Luhansk: Pantsir-S1” page would benefit from a link to a street view of the street seen in the video: http://maps.yandex.ru/-/CVGuM6JG
And in general some comment about how a video or a photo was geolocated would be helpful for journalists and researchers.

why are there no photos published here made by the highly sophisticated USA satellites ?
they can make very clear pictures of every vehicle, which could easily be distributed to the whole mainstream media . . .

It is not the job of IMINT to deliver informations to mainstream media. There function is to deliver information to military and political decision makers. IMINT’s capability, is a valuable asset of intelligence agencies, that in their own interest should not be spread and demonstrated public to the eyes of the counterparties. Never tell the enemy that you know what you know, thats a pretty simple rule.

If they leak those IMINT informations, what can be achieved with it? At least US would manoeuver it self into a position where they have to react in some way. So they whould loose options.

Well, and one thing is obvious: mainstream media has enough sources to make a case about Putins lies over the Russian agression in Ukraine. When bellingcat can, why not the media. Media should not get intimidated by this cheap attemps of professional Russian Troll agencies, which pay hundreds of poor guys to spam social media with this bullshit you can allready read here too (f.e. Ok – February 14th, 2015: What kind of nonsense! Where is the evidence?).

One thing can be taken for granted: sooner or later – Crimea demonstrated it – Putin has to admit that he lied about some obvious things to cover the crimes of his Hunta. Mainstream media should not hesitate to publish every aspect that can be assured by good redearch work.